Little Tramp:'Circus,' '28 Film With Chaplin, Is Revived

By ROGER GREENSPUN

Published: December 16, 1969

CHARLIE CHAPLIN'S "The Circus" opened Jan. 2, 1928, at the Strand Theater. If this review seems a little late, it at least has an occasion to justify it—a new run for "The Circus," which has begun playing at the 72d Street Playhouse.

Chaplin has added a soundtrack, no dialogue, but a musical score that he himself composed. Anybody who has seen recent Chaplin movies, especially the miraculous "A Countess From Hong Kong," knows that he writes the loveliest kitsch background music since the Oskar Straus waltzes that graced the great Max Ophuls films of the early 1950's.

"The Circus" discovers Charlie, in the person of the Little Tramp, standing hungry outside a traveling circus, and it leaves him, sitting in the ring, after the circus itself has pulled away. In between, Charlie joins the circus as roustabout, saves it with the humor of his monumental ineptitude, falls in love with the circus owner's daughter (Merna Kennedy), and loses her to the handsome tightrope walker — whose suit he bravely promotes.

The theme of unhappy romance is not unusual in the major Chaplin films, though it is treated with less circumstance and much less pathetic detail in "The Circus" than in, say, "The Gold Rush" or "City Lights"—both of which enjoy accidental happy endings that are more gracious than gratuitous.

The exemplary renunciation at the end of this film essentially begs an appreciation of what the Little Tramp stands for and what, despite his deserts, he is likely to get.

But the image of the circus itself, an arena partly intended for comic performance, is a little unusual. Chaplin works very hard not to exploit it.

As a circus employe he succeeds at everything except comedy. He services the animals, moves the props; and, even in a pinch, walks the high wire (the film's great climactic routine, and as prodigiously funny as anything in Chaplin), but he never makes it as a clown, and all the laughs are, from Charlie's point of view, unintentional.

Even the regular circus clowns are unfunny, which is why Charlie is hired in the first place—to get laughs without meaning to. That group of clowns, seen in medium long shot, tumbling, jumping, running, working like crazy in the ring, but to no avail, are for me the most mysterious and moving image in the film. Everything in Chaplin's circus militates against good times. Acts fail, the owner beats his daughter and denies her food, the property men quit because they are not paid—and the ring itself displays failure, pain and frustration.

Charlie succeeds, in effect, by disrupting the circus—by interrupting the acts, exposing the secrets of magician's prop table (another great comic routine), running to escape a normally placid donkey that charges madly every time it sees him. Therefore the circus functions much like any other Chaplin locale that Charlie divides to conquer. But at the same time it is meant to keep much of its traditional sentimental weight and even some of its handy metaphorical significance. "The Circus" is very knowledgeable about its world, but I don't think it is very deeply committed to it.

At the end, the Little Tramp sits alone in the tentless ring. The circus wagons have all vanished in a cloud of dust—a really speedy desertion. A memento of his beloved lies in the dirt at his feet, and only sky and suburban scrubland surrounds him.

A call to emotion is at hand, but at least in me, the response is not forthcoming. We have too often throughout the film, in the spaces between the great set pieces, glimpsed the mind behind the matter, and now we confront not so much the pathos of the situation as the careful promotion of a well-beloved institution.